Jeffrey Greenbaum
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley

Contact information
Department of Economics, UC Berkeley
508-1 Evans #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 516-359-9327

Curriculum vitae

Fields of interest
Primary: Economic History, Labor Economics
Secondary: Development, Econometrics, Public Finance

Job Market Paper
Land Endowments, Child Labor, and the Rise of Public Schooling: Evidence from Racial Inequlity in the U.S. South
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Abstract: Black children born in the U.S. South in 1910 attended inferior schools and received three fewer years of education than their white peers.  These racial differences diminished significantly in the following three decades, most notably in the Cotton Belt.  Moreover, there was no major federal policy targeted at black schools during this period.  I propose that the demand for child labor can explain these trends in racial inequality.  To test this explanation, I digitize archival school district data and combine them with data on cotton production.  I argue that prior to 1910, the demands of cotton crowded out black schooling in this region because (1) its land endowments were conducive to growing cotton, (2) growing it was particularly child-labor intensive, and (3) black children were more frequently employed than white children.  School boards under invested in black schools as a result of the demand for black child labor by both white landowners and black parents.  I provide evidence that black-white differences in public school quality in 1910 were larger in cotton-growing regions of the South than in otherwise comparable non-cotton growing regions.  I also show that most of these racial differences narrowed during two periods: (1) the early 1920s slowdown of cotton production, and (2) beginning in the mid-1930s when New Deal policy indirectly discouraged cotton share tenancy and consequently suppressed demand for child labor.  These results suggest a reinterpretation of how institutions developed during the Jim Crow era by emphasizing land endowments and child labor, which in turn has consequences for black well being during the 20th century.

Work in progress
Black-White Differences in the Returns to School Quality and Adult Mortality in the U.S.   Download Prospectus
Abstract: Black-white differences in adult health have narrowed significantly in the U.S. over the past few decades.  Underlying this disparity are racial differences in education.  In this paper, I estimate the extent to which the early-20th century reduction of the black-white gap in school quality in the South accounts for this racial convergence in health.  I first formalize health as a function of school attendance and the returns to education, both of which depend on the quality of education available.  I then estimate returns to education by instrumenting school quality with cotton prices and New Deal policy.  These instruments show why demand for child labor fell, and in turn, why investments in black school quality rose.  I use census microdata to construct synthetic cohorts by race, and link each one to the quality of schools available when they were children.  The schooling data come from archival reports of education that I digitize.  This paper complements a larger literature on assessing the most cost-effective child policy for improving later-life well being, and more generally, the long-term effects of early-life shocks.
Agriculture and the Labor Market for Teachers in the United States., 1900-1950
Prosperity, Female Labor Supply, and Fertility: Origins and Persistence of the U.S. Baby Boom” 

Teaching
Graduate Econometrics (Econ 240B) with Prof. James Powell.  Download Section Notes

References
Prof. Kenneth Chay (principal advisor), Kenneth_Chay [at] brown.edu
Prof. Barry Eichengreen (principal advisor), eichengr [at] econ.berkeley.edu
Prof. Robert Margo, margora [at ] bu.edu
Prof. Edward Miguel, emiguel [at ] econ.berkeley.edu